Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has posted an airbrushed copy of his monthly check he gets from FeedBurner for putting advertising inside his RSS feed. The airbrush job is not that good and speculation the check is about $6400.00. While most bloggers would like a check that size. I think the real ground truth is this.

The check is Hand Written and the check number is 2116 this tells me that of the thousands of RSS feeds with advertising they are serving up each month. Only a small fraction of those running ads in their RSS feeds are getting paid.

At RawVoice we could not imagine having to hand write checks. So if a company like FeedBurner is hand writing checks it tells me that the number of checks they are writing per month is probably under 50. They have been writing checks for advertising in RSS feeds for a long time and to only have written 2116 checks is beyond shocking.

My advice remains the same it always has been, it is best to control your own RSS feed!